Friday, July 31, 2009 John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com>:
John,
(I've been battling a dental infection the past two days so I might be
missing a fine point you're trying to make, my apologies in advance if
that's the case...)
To put it plainly, as of IE 9, licenses will have to be redrafted as will
anything and everything predicated on IE's continued support for EOT
classic. There is no way for feature-by-feature support for both to exist in
tandem. There will be breakage. Downlevel IE versions will be able to read
EOTL but the converse won't be true. And as Vlad points out in a later post,
EOT classic files will likely have MTX and XOR anyway, and will have to be
re-made.
>I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that a browser that fails to follow
>this when encountering an EOT-Classic font is at legal risk.
Since, as a practical matter, in >IE8 certain features of EOT CL will be
obsolete and you'll need new files, where does a problem arise? And as a
non-lawyer who's better-read than most on the pertinent case law, I don't
see any risk even if the files didn't need to be re-made. I echo what Thomas
Phinney said on this.
Regards,
rich
-----Original Message-----
From: www-font-request@w3.org [mailto:www-font-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
John Hudson
Sent: Friday, July 31, 2009 2:20 AM
To: Levantovsky, Vladimir
Cc: Thomas Lord; Thomas Phinney; Sylvain Galineau; Tab Atkins Jr.;
robert@ocallahan.org; John Daggett; www-font
Subject: Re: EOT-Lite File Format
Vladimir wrote:
> As I understand what the current draft says
> (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-font/2009JulSep/0780.html), the
> EOT-Lite conforming UA will render a font if it's capable to do so,
> regardless of the presence of rootstring (i.e. completely ignoring the
> root strings, whether mismatched or not).
It makes sense that the EOT-Lite proposal makes such a statement about
EOT-Lite fonts. But, again, this presumes a distinction can be made
between EOT-Lite and EOT-Classic fonts when encountered in the wild,
because ignoring the rootstrings in a format that deliberately states
that rootstrings should be ignored is different from ignoring
rootstrings in a format that deliberately states that
User Agents must validate that the page using
the embedded font is within the list of URLs
from which the embedded font object may be
legitimately referenced. [1]
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that a browser that fails to follow
this when encountering an EOT-Classic font is at legal risk. If not, why
all the fuss about DMCA? At the very least, this seems to me a question
that needs to be examined by qualified lawyers experienced with this
kind of issue.
At present, the non-IE browser makers are deliberately not touching EOT
fonts because they don't want to get entangled with the rootstring
issue. They're not supporting EOT but ignoring rootstrings: they're
keeping the heck away from EOT altogether. It seems to me that they must
continue to do so, because the status of EOT Classic fonts doesn't
magically change when EOT Lite comes along. This means that while EOT
Lite fonts can be backwards compatible with IE<=8, EOT Classic fonts
must not be forwards compatible with EOT Lite. Somehow the two formats
need to be clearly distinct at the file level, such that an EOT Lite
implementing browser can process the one but avoid the other.
JH
[1] http://www.w3.org/Submission/2008/SUBM-EOT-20080305/#RootString